In the final days before Tuesday’s election, the news aggregator Drudge Report was one of many conservative-leaning media outlets that predicted a solid victory by Mitt Romney over President Obama. As late as November 5, Drudge reported Romney was leading in Ohio and tied in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Perhaps in a last-gasp show of defiance on election night, as major networks began to call Ohio for Obama, Drudge posted an asterisk next to the President’s popular vote numbers–even though he would eventually overtake Romney in that category too.

But if you had to pinpoint a moment that described the collective shock by the conservative media and rank-and-file supporters, it was the meltdown by Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News. Jon Stewart shows us Rove’s confusion and revels in a little schadenfreude in the following clip from The Daily Show.

So what happened? The Atlantic explains that as the conservative media was misinforming its audience about the numbers, the mainstream media was citing more reliable forecasts by statistician Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the voting outcome in all 50 states in this year’s election.

While the conservative media model wasn’t able to pin down this year’s election numbers, it still engages audiences more effectively than other platforms like MSNBC as political commentator Rachel Maddow explains below.